A Free-Spirited Family Gave Rise to Oscar Wilde

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By Deborah Lutz

Dec. 9, 2016

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF WILDEOscar Wilde and His FamilyBy Emer O’SullivanIllustrated. 495 pp. Bloomsbury Press. $35.

By all accounts, Oscar Wilde put his true art into being Oscar Wilde. He spoke in faultless sentences and, with his brilliance of dress and force of presence, drew beauty out of transient moments. His writing then recounted this perfection of daily being, this ability to be steeped in the immediacy of place and time. The aesthetic philosophy he lived was developed in part by his mentor, Walter Pater, an Oxford professor; Wilde gave flesh to Pater’s ideas, especially the notion that success is “to burn always with this hard gemlike flame.” Yet an even greater influence was Wilde’s mother, with her gift for loading each instant with poetic passion.

While Wilde’s imprisonment for “acts of gross indecency with male persons” was a tragedy, he may have avoided the misfortune outlined in one of his many bons mots: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.” In her deeply researched biography of the Wilde family, Emer O’Sullivan reminds us of the influence of Jane Wilde, a bluestocking who sometimes called herself Speranza and invented for herself a romantic Italian family tree.

A wildly erudite member of the Young Ireland movement, Jane made her name as a poet, intellectual and supporter of women’s rights. Her salons gathered together the key thinkers of the day — W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Robert Browning and Eleanor Marx (Karl’s socialist daughter). Jane walks right off the page in “The Fall of the House of Wilde,” and I wished for more of her, especially when it came to her many publications and how they colored Oscar’s writing. “Listening to their mother’s reading and embellishing the lyrics,” O’Sullivan writes of Jane reciting Whitman to her sons, “would have created in the boys a visceral bond between the maternal and the word, a place of storied memories of desire, loss and sensual pleasure.”

Instead, and in sometimes plodding prose, O’Sullivan gives equal time to Wilde’s philandering father, a doctor with an interest in Celtic antiquities. For history to have lost sight of Wilde’s father seems like merely carelessness, but to have lost Lady Wilde is a great misfortune.

O’Sullivan’s book is strongest when she positions the Wildes within the larger framework of Irish history; many Wilde biographers glide over not only his mother but also his Irishness. Yet O’Sullivan’s narrative lacks the vitality of Richard Ellmann’s elegant biography, whose intricate analysis draws revealing connections and goes deep. Could Wilde’s relationship with his bold mother, who risked imprisonment and death by speaking out against the injustices perpetrated on the Irish by the British, have anything to do with his own risky behavior in relation to his sexuality? More pointedly, Oscar Wilde wrote of his wife’s pregnancy as “loathsome,” evidence of “disgusting” nature, a defilement of beauty with “the vile cicatrices of maternity,” concluding that “it befouls the altar of the soul.” With this blatant misogyny, most obvious in his treatment of the woman Jane Wilde had pushed him to marry, might Oscar be rebelling against the mother (and the maternal) he wished to resemble?

O’Sullivan calls back to flickering life an intriguing figure in feminist history. Virginia Woolf wrote of the great unpublished works of women — those meals, salons and gardens that have their short time in the sun and then are gone. Wilde’s radiant art of living, hard to translate into the fixity of published words, was mostly lost after his early death. His mother, whose great work was her embrace of the splendor and awful brevity of each moment, disappeared more completely.

Deborah Lutz’s most recent book is “The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects.”